Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

This is a long, interesting, carefully written article by Alex Kotlowitz about a program to change community behaviors in service of decreasing violence. It is nice to see a discussion of how to reduce polarization. There is so much entertainment value in polarization that the media revel in it. It is further to the article’s credit that it doesn’t play the card of Chicago’s most recent violent troubles into the text.
If I was to be critical of the article it would only be how it leaves the impression that the means being used here were entirely gin’d up by the folks involved. I certainly hope that many of these were imported from other violence reduction efforts, and most of the methods outlined I’ve read about in other venues; particularly the negotiation handbooks.

Given my interest in group dynamics I was interested by the story about a kid who wanted to resign from a gang. Much negotiation through various possible outcomes, “no”, “well, maybe, after a beating,” until they settled with the kid paying a fee. Not unlike getting out of your cell phone contract, eh? Joining a group often involves a hazing, and I suspect leaving often involves a beating - or at least a standing debt.  You can’t make the books never balance inside a club good community.

That groups are a sources of violence is clear. You get discipline inside, and polarization between, but I hadn’t noticed before that movements of members across the group member boundaries can also generate violence.

One other thing that caught my interest, because it’s analogous to atomization effect we see in other systems these days. “Many of the interrupters seem bewildered by what they see as a wilder group of youngsters now running the streets and by a gang structure that is no longer top-down but is instead made up of many small groups — which they refer to as cliques — whose members are answerable to a handful of peers.” When the middle scale systems die off you left with nothing but long-tail, and elites in their walled-gardens.

The skills these “interrupters” have are skills that we all should have. Skills the media should model. A culture rich in these skills can tolerate a lot more diversity. That there is honor in turning the other check. It is man’s work to intervene in a fight. The article is here.

I like to talk about leveraging the talent on the other side of the Internet, or talent scraping. That talent is only just recently discovered. We are in a kind of gold rush to figure out how to mine it. I’ve called that mining industry talent-scrapping, in part to suggest how it’s like a whale filtering plankton from nutrient rich waters.
Talent is usually considered scarce. But now it’s abundant. But now it is different in form than in the past. More diffuse. We used to concentrate it into locations, universities or cities, but now it’s just out there; on the other side of the net. So most of our intuitions are wrong about how to manage it or accumulate it.

We are in a curious situation where you have a choice between abundant talent v.s. scarce talent - but where we have very refined craft knowledge about how to mange scarce talent (think standardized testing, university diplomas, publication pipelines) v.s. very immature craft knowledge about how to tap diffuse talent pools.

That combo scarce-but-skilled vs. abundant-but-unskilled must be a common situation when a new option space break open. It is notable that their is scarcity on both sides of that equation; but they are of a very different nature. One is a resource scarcity, and the other is a lack of expertise - an information good.
When people talk about the attention economy I’ve tended to presume they were saying that attention is scarce. Certainly my attention is a limited resource. I certainly have a whole bag of tricks for managing that scarce resource.

Clay Shirky takes a run at this problem in a most excellent recent essay where-in he introduces the delightful term “cognitive surplus.” He gets there in a most marvelous way that is just hip slapping funny.

The idea of an attention economy is that there is some gross national product of talent out there. That it’s like the water supply of a big city, a pipe flows into the city of skill, and there is only a certain amount to be had - so you really ought to be careful what you spend it on.

I recall how when back in the 1960s there was a drought around NYC and people started talking about water conservation. We used to get a glass of water automatically when every you sat down in a restaurant and they stopped that. I recall hearing how silly that was since meanwhile the water authority came to discover that rivers of water were leaking from the system; entire pipelines were flowing hundreds of miles only be dumped into the Hudson.

To adopt Clay’s term cognition is the water of the attention economy and his point is that we just maybe we are pouring most of the talent on the planet into the abyss.

Talent isn’t scarce anymore, the real question is where the hell has all the talent been going all these years. Clay has some suggestions, and possibly most interesting to me was the hint that society in the past has struggled with this very same question; it’s “the idle hands - the devils playground” problem. And for God sake don’t miss the punch line at the end of his essay!

Over at 43 things, a site where people can clot together around random common goals, I see that two thousand people have revealed thier desire to “become better at small-talk.” The “learn to make polite empty chit chat” group has only 59 people. I’m a bit distressed that only one person wants to learn how to banter.

The books on small-talk advise one to talk about the weather. Though they rarely mention that it’s critical to avoid being drawn into the ongoing dispute about why nobody does anything about it. Even the origins of that particular dispute remain contentious: Mark Twain or Samuel Clements?

Talk about the weather is one of the seed crystals of group forming. It’s surprising how far you can go. When ever I’m trying to explain how much I enjoy lurking in esoteric enthusiastic groups on the internet I always mention Tornado chasers; since I was lurking in that group back in the 1980s.

All this is really preface to a shout out.

Some folks in Iowa have created Jabber chat rooms for each national weather service office. What’s sweet about these chat rooms is that they pump real time weather alerts into the rooms. So even if nobody else in your area cares to join the room this is still the best way to get real time weather alerts for your area.

For example zzboxcat@muc.appriss.com is the Jabber ID for the Boston area weather office, who’s mnemonic is BOX. Just replace that mnemonic with the appropriate one for your area.

This is easy, well it’s easy once you puzzle out a) how to find your area’s weather office, and b) how to join a jabber chat room.

Delightful:

The term “controversy” amuses me. It seems like it’s a holdout from the pre-internet era when there might actually have been something that no one felt strongly about.  - Floppy, Hoppy Bunnies

Craftsmen always love their tools.  Further most of them love their problem.  And curiously the policeman must sympathize with the criminal; otherwise how will he be able to model his thinking. Negotiators advise you to walk in the other guy’s shoes. Success in complementing the other function plays out best if understand the other function, to a degree, i.e. the best engineers know a bit about sales, manufacturing, quality assurance, or product marketing.
There is a odd mutant form of this pattern where in the problem solver becomes the problem’s advocate.  Defending it.  Assuring the problem persists, that it survives.  This happens when the problem solver’s survival becomes tightly linked to the problem’s survival.  When they have become codependent.
Clay sketches this out nicely in his new book (go get a copy).

The modern example is the record company. Your business solves (what used to be) a hard problem; e.g. how do we get excellent high quality audio performances widely distributed to the general public. Back in the day that was hard! Wax cylinders for heaven’s sake!  Limited shelf space!  Damn radio station play lists!

Now days anybody with a computer can do it; so it’s not really a problem anymore. But for the industry, given that they are in the business of solving that hard problem, they have become the problem’s best friend.  Fighting tooth and nail to keep the problem hard. Odd, isn’t it?

Say your a religion. Your business solves the hard problem of giving people a way stay true to a set of principles; call them ethical principles if you want. But these days modern societies have spun up dozens of schemes to help groups of people stay a chosen course. Some are organizational, like hierarchical management or professional societies, some are technical, like pda’s, some are very transient like flash mobs or flicker groups formed on a single tag; but none of them look particularly like the classic mainstream religion. Again the religion becomes an advocate for the problem.
Clay tells the amusing story of finding some rants defending the craft of monks copying manuscripts in the face of the printing press. He derives a bit of fun by noting that the rant was run off on a printing press.

Recall that Clay’s book is an investigation of what’s unfolding as the cost of forming groups becomes radically different.  As the cost falls below what he delightfully calls Course’s floor.  One of his ideas is that these new easy to form groups are often bound by light forces, affection for example.

Threatening the livelihood of a problem solver is only the most exaggerated scenario for drawing out this odd pattern where he becomes the problem’s best friend.  The problem solver has affection for his tools, his profession, his institutions, his clients.  Deep affection.  When the shift happens and the displacement arrives these ties can not be casually unbound.  To me, that makes it a lot easier to sympathize with a what looks at first to be quite hypocritical behavior.  Gotta love ‘em.